'If you'll ride out with me I'll pay you a hundred dollars each.'
'That's good money, but what about our claim?'
'This means everything to me, boys. I talked to Dickey and Wells, and they're reliable men who will watch your claim.'
Cap lit up his pipe and I poured coffee for all of us. Clark just wasn't a-woofin'. Most of the miners who gambled their money away at the Rose-Marie in town had no trouble leaving. It was only those who tried to leave with their money. At least three were sitting a-top some fat pokes of gold wondering how to get out alive and still keep what they'd worked for.
'Clark,' I said, 'Cap and me, we need the money. We'd help even if you couldn't afford to pay.'
'Believe me, it's worth it.'
So I got up off the ground. 'Cap, I'll just go in and have a little talk with Martin Brady.'
Clark got up. 'You're crazy!'
'Why, I wouldn't want him to think us deceitful, Clark, so I'll just go tell him we're riding out tomorrow. I'll also tell him what will happen if anybody bothers us.'
There were thirty or forty men in the Rose-Marie when I came in. Brady came to me, drying his big hands on his apron. 'We're fresh out of bourbon,' he said, 'you'll have to take bar whiskey.'
'I just came to tell you Jim Clark is riding out of the country tomorrow and he's taking all that gold he didn't spend in here.'
You could have heard a pin drop. When I spoke those words I said them out loud so everybody could hear. Brady's cigar rolled between his teeth and he got white around the eyes, but I had an eye on the two loafers at the end of the bar.
'Why tell me?' He didn't know what was coming but he knew he wouldn't like it.
'Somebody might think Clark was going alone,' I said 'and they might try to kill him the way Wilton and Jacks and Thompson were killed, but I figured it would be deceitful of me to ride along with Clark and let somebody get killed trying to get his gold. You see, Clark is going to make it.'
'I hope he does,' Brady rolled that cigar again, those cold little eyes telling me they hated me. 'He's a good man.'
He started to walk away but I wasn't through with him.
'Brady?'
He turned slowly.
'Clark is going through because I'm going to see that he gets through, and when he's gone, I'm coming back.'
'So?' He put his big hands on the edge of the bar. 'What does that mean?'
'It means that if we have any trouble at all, I'm going to come back here and either run you out of town or bury you.'
Somebody gasped and Martin Brady's face turned a kind of sick white, he was that mad. 'It sounds like you're calling me a thief.' He kept both hands in plain sight. 'You'd have to prove that.'
'Prove it? Who to? Everybody knows what killing and robbery there has been was engineered by you. There's no court here but a six-shooter court and I'm presiding.'
So nothing happened. It was like I figured and it was out in the open now, and Martin Brady had to have me killed, but he didn't dare do it right then. We put Clark on the stage and started back to our own claims.
We were almost to bedrock now and we wanted to clean up and get out. We were getting the itch to go back to Santa Fe and back to Mora. Besides, I kept thinking of Dursilla.
Bob Wells was sitting on our claim with a rifle across his knees when we came in. 'I was gettin' spooked,' he said, 'it don't seem like Brady to take this layin' down.'
Dickey came over from his claim and several others, two of whom I remembered from the Rose-Marie Saloon the night I told off Martin Brady.
'We been talking it around,' Dickey said, 'and we figure you should be marshal.'
'No.'
'Can you name anybody else?' Wells asked reasonably. 'This gold strike is going to play out, but a few of the mines will continue to work, and I plan to stay on here. I want to open a business, and I want this to be a clean town.'
The others all pitched in, and finally Dickey said, 'Sackett, with all respect, I believe it's your public duty.'
Now I was beginning to see where reading can make a man trouble. Reading Locke, Hume, Jefferson, and Madison, had made me begin to think mighty high of a man's public duty.
Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.
It was all right for folks back east to give reasons why trouble should be handled without violence. Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman, and usually they are sure there's one handy.
'All right,' I said, 'on two conditions: first, that somebody else takes over when the town is cleaned up. Second, that you raise money enough to buy out Martin Brady.'
'Buy him out? I say, run him out!'
Who it was yelled, I don't know, but I spoke right up in meeting. 'All right, whoever you are. You run him out.'
There was a silence then, and when they had gathered the fact that the speaker wasn't going to offer I said, 'We run him out and we're no better than he is.'
'All right,' Wells agreed, 'buy him out.'
'Well, now,' I said, 'we can be too hasty. I didn't say we should buy him out, what I say is we should offer. We make him a cash offer and whatever he does then is up to him.'
Next day in town I got down from my horse in front of the store. Wind blew dust along the street and skittered dry leaves along the boardwalk. It gave me a lonesome feeling. Looking down the street I had a feeling the town would die.
No matter what happened here, what I was going to do was important. Maybe not for this town, but for men everywhere, for there must be right. Strength never made right, and it is an indecency when it is allowed to breed corruption. The west was changing. One time they would have organized vigilantes and had some necktie parties, but now they were hiring a marshal, and the next step would be a town meeting and a judge or a mayor.
Martin Brady saw me come in. His two men standing at the bar saw me too, and one of them moved a mite so his gun could be right under his hand and not under the edge of the bar.
There was nothing jumpy inside me, just a slow, measured, waiting feeling.
Around me everything seemed clearer, sharper in detail, the shadows and lights, the grain of wood on the bar, the stains left by the glasses, a slight tic on the cheek of one of Brady's men, and he was forty feet away.
'Brady, this country is growing up. Folks are moving in and they want schools, churches, and quiet towns where they can walk in the streets of an evening.'
He never took his eyes from me, and I had a feeling he knew what was coming.
Right then I felt sorry for Martin Brady, although his kind would outlast my kind because people have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gambling, thieving, and robbing are covered over, folks will tolerate it longer than outright violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.
Folks had much to say about the evil of those years, yet it took hard men to live the life, and their pleasures were apt to be rough and violent. They came from the world around, the younger sons of fine families, the ne'er- do-wells, the soldiers of fortune, the drifters, the always-broke, the promoters, the con men, the thieves. The frontier asked no questions and gave its rewards to the strong.
Maybe it needed men like Martin Brady, even the kind who lived on murder and robbery, to plant a town here at such a jumping-off place to nowhere. An odd thought occurred to me. Why had he called the saloon and the town Rose-Marie?
'Like I said, the country is growing up, Martin. You've been selling people rot-gut liquor, you've been cheating them out of hide an' hair, you've been robbing and murdering them. Murdering them was going too far, Martin, because when you start killing men, they fight back.'
